Wednesday, January 09, 2013

Anthony Quinn on his Troubled upbringing

With a hat tip to Crime Always Pays come a link to this essay by novelist Anthony Quinn about his childhood in Northern Ireland. (I wrote about Quinn's novel Disappearedhere and here.) The interview will explain much about why Northern Ireland remains fertile territory for some of today's best crime writing.

By coincidence, I read the interview a day after the obituary of a former reporter for my newspaper included this excerpt from his 1981 article about the funeral of Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands:

“In a grimy gray drizzle, under ragged black flags that lifted and waved balefully in the fitful air; to the wail of a single piper, on streets winding through charred and blasted brick spray-painted with slogans of hate; by silent tens of thousands, past fathers holding sons face-forward that they might remember the day, past mothers rocking and shielding prams that held tomorrow’s fighters, past old men who blew their rheumy noses and remembered their own days of rage … Bobby Sands was carried yesterday to a grave of raw Ulster mud.”

And that, in turn, leads to the even more felicitous coincidence that this week marks the UK release of Adrian McKinty's I Hear the Sirens in the Streets, which would be the best book I've read in 2013 if I hadn't read it in 2012. Sirens follows on the excellent Cold Cold Ground. Read both, and find out what McKinty fans like Daniel Woodrell and Ian Rankin are talking about.

22 Comments:

I have a horribly naive vacuum in my mind about Northern Ireland. For example, I do not know the answers to these questions: Is there a majority or a minority there unhappy with British rule? What on earth are the reasons for the tensions between Protestants and Catholics (in both NI and ROI)? What is England's motivation in hanging on to their colonial interest? My ignorance is staggering and embarrassing. Hell, I can barely figure out what the hell is going on in this country (God help us all).

R.T., I think many in North America have naive and skewed views of the trouble in Northern Ireland. I was surprised to learn on my first visit to Belfast, for example, that there had been Protestant, Irish-speaking nationalists--and to find that, while the Protestant nationalist Wolfe Tone gets mentioned in the Republican museum on the Falls Road, Michael Collins does not, as far as I could tell. And that got me acquainted with the Irish Civil War. And then, upon reading a bit of Irish history, I learned that the first Englishmen to establish footholds in Ireland in the twelfth century were, in fact, Anglo-Normans and, in come cases, zealous preservers of Irish tradition.

But I think the enmity really started with the "plantations" of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--mass settlements of English incomers in Irish land. Now, I don't know the dynamics of that process, but it's not hard to imagine that Englishmen brought in by the British crown (or by Cromwell) at that time would have been less than charitable toward Catholics.

That's all basic stuff, but it's a good deal more complex than the view of Ireland I grew up with (without, however, having a particular interest at the time): the simplistic idea that English=Protestant=oppressors=bad, and Irish=Catholic=martyrs and freedom fighters=good. It does not take much study to realize that the reality is more complicated than that. Back in North America, it's no shock that zealotry increases the farther one gets from the consequences of such zealotry. Adrian McKinty deals nicely with this in his novel The Dead Yard. And that reminds me that I did not pick up Northern Ireland crime writers because I was interested in their country. Rather, I became interested in their fascinating country because of writers like McKinty, Stuart Neville, and Garbhan Downey

I saw that Deb Klemperer is listing some "Low Countries" authors that she is not familiar with over at Adrian's place. I'm not sure if they are all crime writers or not, but in any case, Ive never heard of them. You might want to go over and take a look.

Arriving late to the party, I just overheard you speaking of ghosts. Those pesky spectres have an interesting history, particularly in Renaissance England in the 16th century when the whole Catholic-Protestant upheaval happened; if I recall correctly, many Catholics believed ghosts could be actual deceased folks seeking help from those still alive (i.e., the deceased needed prayerful help getting out of purgatory), many Protestants believed ghosts could be diabolic visitations in the guise of the deceased, and the more secular minds believed ghosts were simply visions produced by diseased minds. Shakespeare's Hamlet is a good case study in these different points of view. Now, with ROI and NI writers, I suppose the Catholic-Protestant-secular theories might still be applicable. However, if you were not really talking about ghosts, then I--as a late-comer to the party--apologize for misunderstanding the conversation. Shame on me.

Well, we are talking about ghosts, or at least I am. A supernatural story would probably do nothing for me. The trick is to make ghosts believable to the reader, or at least to make the reader believe the ghosts are real to the characters.

In fact, the ghosts in book are due, in fact, to stress induced my repeated killings and, I think, alcohol and drugs. In the other, they are due to stress, guilt, and dementia. But they feel no less real for that, which requires impressive chops o the part of both writers. In both cases, the idea of a traumatic period such as the Troubles having an afterlife no doubt suggested the ghost motif.

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About Me

This blog is a proud winner of the 2009 Spinetingler Award for special services to the industry and its blogkeeper a proud former guest on Wisconsin Public Radio's Here on Earth. In civilian life I'm a copy editor in Philadelphia. When not reading crime fiction, I like to read history. When doing neither, I like to travel. When doing none of the above, I like listening to music or playing it, the latter rarely and badly.
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